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Hawks
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He goes North first, spends four days wandering the coast of the Okhotsk sea. Humanity is scarce up there, and half the population he does see are Russian fishermen who have no interest in the Hero politics of Japan. They don't even recognize him, pay him no mind, and certainly won't talk about him on social media. Hawks knows he can disappear up in that lonely place if he wants to, but it isn't right. He eats too little, drinks too much, and barely sleeps at all. He considers retreating into the wilderness and allowing the hawk to take over. He thinks about death. He does everything he can to not let Endeavor-san and what happened into his mind, though he's only moderately successful. A life of building walls is bound to fall apart sooner or later, though it'd be nice if it were later rather than sooner.
But four days is enough, and the hole within him only grows larger and larger. He needs to go home, to a home he never thought he had. There's only one place for him though, one place for a murderer, son of a murderer.
A decrepit abandoned house in the South. A home that isn't a home, but is still all he's ever known. It takes him an entire day to fly down there, taking breaks now and then to drop low, catch the drift from a shinkansen. The wind is brutal, but it's nothing he isn't used to. It's exhausting, and by the evening of the fifth day after the incident, he can barely crawl through the door, miraculously still on its hinges and openable, into the place where he was born.
No one's been there in nearly twenty years, and it's slowly falling apart without a tiny five-year-old to patch the holes in the floors. A telltale crunch of bone beneath his feet reminds him, memories coming in bits and flashes, of when his mother caught him eating a mouse. He'd only been three or four, and she'd snatched it from his bloody hands, slapped him, then put her arms around him and sobbed. It was one of the only times she ever hugged him, though even as a toddler, he recognized that she was only seeking comfort for himself, a hug for the lonely woman who birthed an animal in a shack while dreaming of fame and fortune.
The Commission trained the hunter out of him. He didn't have to eat mice and small birds anymore, so it was easy. He could go back to that life now, if he wanted to. He's already disappeared; it'd be so easy to crawl off into the wilderness and let the raptor in him take over, the bird brain that he'd learned to suppress as a child. But that isn't good enough. It isn't final enough. He can bury the human, but he can never bury the love he has for Endeavor-san.
This is the true reason why he came home.
He opens his mouth wide, sinks his teeth into his wrist and screams silently. It's over. Everything's over. Endeavor would never speak to him. Any hope he'd ever had of being with him is dead. He thought he could live with it; he'd lived without him for most of his life, after all. He could just go back to that, keep going about his life as a hero without Endeavor at his side. But he can't, he can't. Because there's no hope now, nothing to look forward to, nothing to strive for. He lets himself go, lets the wild thing inside of him out and closes his mind for a moment. He feels his wings explode, thousands of feathers breaking away as they lash through the room.
He loves him. He'd loved him since before he even met him, but he knows now that the love he feels is different than the kind which he always believed he had. He can't even say he's in love with him, because there's something so mundane about that, and whatever he has for Endeavor is so deep and raw as to be voiceless and nameless. He can't live with the knowledge that this man hates him.
But that's not it. It's that he's done all he can for him now. He's saved Endeavor as much as he can, has gone to the limits of his capability, and there's nothing more he can accomplish. He's completed what he was born to do.
When he opens his eyes again, his wings are back together. The room is dusty now, the floor covered in splinters and cotton batting from the futon he'd slashed to pieces, the tatami torn up and the windows shattered. It's not as bad as he expects. He doesn't have the energy anymore; he's only a ghost of the boy who saved eight lives in a matter of seconds so many years ago.
He turns to the closet in the corner of the bedroom then, his little sanctuary. The door, though now chipped and scarred, is still firmly shut, and he has to jerk it hard to open it. Then he crouches and sighs, blowing up dust that spirals lazily in the air around him. It has to still be there, scratched in the back of the closet, down near the floor and to the left. He pulls his glove off and presses his fingers to the baseboard, feeling the engraving. He knows what it says, doesn't need to see it, but he wants to. He flicks a few feathers across the room, shoots them through the ragged remains of the curtains and allows a bit more light to filter in. It's sadder in sunlight, somehow, but he can see it now.
Keigo and Endeavor. Hiragana for his own name because he didn't even know how to write the kanji. And there's a heart around the words, jagged flames carved around the heart. He remembers carving every painstaking character, every line in the dark. Waiting until his father was gone for a few days, until his mother was so deep in the alcohol she couldn't even recognize her own son, he'd take one of his feathers, hard and sharp, and dig it into the wall. His father didn't know he could do that. His mother suspected, but she said nothing to Takami about it. She didn't care enough about her son, more than likely, or maybe somehow, subconsciously, she realized that telling her murderer husband that their son had wings made of thousands of knives might be unwise. Hawks liked to think it was the latter, liked to think that maybe she cared about him a little, wanted to protect him somehow, but it doesn't matter now.
He wipes his eyes, pinches the bridge of his nose, and sneezes. Just the dust. That's all.
There are crayon scribbles on the wall, more visible. The two of them together. Endeavor, looking like a giant plushie, and Hawks, recognizable by his red wings and one shoe. This tiny room served as his bed, but he'd never felt neglected for it. He had a little corner of privacy, a place to himself where he could block out the arguing in the other room and imagine he was off with Endeavor-san somewhere. His mother often forgot he was even there, and his father rarely bothered to open the door to beat him; it was too much effort that Keigo hadn't been worth. It was why his parents never even noticed that he drew on and carved into the walls.
He drops his feathers again, building his bed for the final time as he crawls in and closes the door much of the way behind him. With one hand, he opens the waterproof bag he always keeps at his belt and pulls out the doll he's kept with him his entire life. There's no need to go further. He can't say it's been a good life in any conventional sense, but it's not been as bad a one as it could have been. He'd met Endeavor. He spent time with him. He saved him as best he could.
It's enough.
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Endeavor
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He knows Hawks is here, that like a wild thing, he crawled back to the only place he could ever call home to die.
It wasn't easy to get this information, to track down the records of a lot of land outside Fukuoka city, sold to one Takami Keigo in January five years ago, just after Hawks turned 18. It was the only record of any Takami Keigo at all, some strange technicality left over from the Edo era that required surnames when buying land. Something that would normally never be an issue for anyone; it was probably the first time the law had had to be enforced in over a century, but Hawks as Hawks wasn't able to buy property.
It had to have significance for him, especially as he never built on it. Simply bought it and left it. Endeavor had been surprised at first as he drove out there, taken aback by how far from the city it was, by the increasingly sparse landscape. Most houses in the vicinity were abandoned and decrepit. Boarded up shops and stray cats and lots overrun by kudzu and weeds. And as he drives, the last week comes to him in bits and flashes.
The paralyzing terror that left him frozen as he stared at Dabi clutching Shoto’s throat, licks of blue flame building around them. He couldn't choose between his sons. It didn't matter that one was a mass murderer. It didn't matter that one had already died. He loved them both, desperately, eternally. Such a choice should be easy, but it wasn't, and he found that he couldn't move.
Hawks had chosen for him, had swept onto the battlefield and stabbed Toya through the back, the feather piercing through him and just grazing Shoto's chest. And then he’d turned to look at Endeavor, his eyes cold and distant. You can hate me. I did what had to be done so you wouldn't have to do it, so Shoto wouldn't have to be tainted like me.
He remembers the raw howl echoing in the flames around him, Shoto's scream as Toya vomited blood onto him and collapsed. He remembers Hawks fleeing, leaping back as Enji lunged for him, spreading his wings wide and falling back and away and then up, vanishing into the darkness beyond before Endeavor could even register.
He left and he didn't come back.
Days went by in a blur. The end of the war. The cremation of Toya's remains, a final irony in that the boy was unable to even cremate himself in the end. The private family ceremony with thousands of protesters lining the streets, enraged that a grieving family would want a final ceremony for a child who'd gone astray.
Endeavor thought of Hawks often, and even Rei, who gently suggested they proceed with the divorce papers in nearly the same breath, as if they were somehow related, asked where he was, but it was too difficult to process that he might have lost his closest friend as well as his son. Hawks was a hero; he was independent; he would be fine without him, wouldn't he?
It was only five days after the war, the day after the funeral, when the unease crept in. No one had heard from Hawks, and the mysterious disappearance of the second Pro Hero was circulating in the news. Shoto had brought it up to Endeavor then, showing him some weird video on the internet about how certain birds like penguins sometimes vanish, head into the wilderness in an environment they can't survive in, how they are the only known animal to kill themselves.Ridiculous, what his kids got up to on the internet, but Shoto had been so serious. You need to find him, Dad.
He went to Hokkaido first, flew to Wakanai and drove along the wild coast. By the time he hit Monbetsu, he knew he was in the wrong place. A visceral sense deep inside of him, the same sense that convinced him he'd know if he was close to Hawks, as illogical as driving aimlessly around was. Because, somehow, he knew Hawks in a way he hadn't even realized until Shoto brought it up. He knew the wild in him, the aloofness and independence he kept close to his heart, but he also knew the boy trapped inside, the lonely one who never really left his father's shadow.
He'd looped back down to Sapporo and boarded a plane to Fukuoka. It was where the remains of the HPSC was, where Hawks used to live. The opposite of the unknown mountains, but Endeavor went on instinct. The younger man was too important to him for him to reconsider the impossibility of what he was doing. Even Rei had said it to him, taken his face in her hands, touched him for the first time in a decade, and finally met his eyes. You need to find him.
The sense of rightness Endeavor feels here is no surprise, but what is a surprise is the poverty, the destitution.
He figured he was poor growing up, but there are a lot of degrees of poverty in Japan. This is the most depressing kind, the countryside poverty. No man's land. No chance of work, at least not legal work. What little drug trade that existed in the country was usually born out in places like this, far enough away from prying law enforcement eyes. The blind assumption was that only the elderly, harmless and law-abiding, lived out in places like this, and so criminals were safe.
Criminals like Hawks' parents. So maybe it's no surprise, but it's still startling. Hawks had always been so upbeat, so positive and hopeful, so willing to go the extra mile for him. And he was good. He saved lives when all he knew was this. He sacrificed himself to protect his mother, a mother that Endeavor knows little about beyond the fact that she sold him out to a murderer. To think he grew up in this environment… Hawks might break one day, if he hasn’t already, and Endeavor wants to be there for him.
He pulls over on the dirty road in front of the lot he has the coordinates for. There's a house on it, perhaps in slightly better shape than many of the others, as if it were lived in only 20 years ago instead of 30 or 40. Nonetheless, the land had been seized by the government when Hawks bought it; nobody had owned it, the last owner having died eighty years since. His family must have been squatters, like so many of the people living out this way probably were then.
And then he sits in the car for a long moment, considering the building before him. Corrugated tin and sagging wooden boards, the ceramic tile of the roof crumbling in areas. The rusted tricycle in the yard surprises him, red paint still showing in areas; was it a ray of light in Hawks' life, or did he never learn how to use it? He wonders who bought it, or who stole it. He tries to imagine Hawks as a toddler, and the thought makes him smile. Was he born with the wings, or did they develop when he was little? He must have been cute either way with that face.
Endeavor shakes his head once and presses his forehead to his hands folded over the steering wheel for a moment. He can't keep stalling. There are three options here, and he doesn't know if he wants to find out the truth. Hawks isn't here. He is here. Or he's here, and he's dead. He needs to know.
The first thing he notices when he steps into the house, the front door already half open, is the trash. He gets the distinct impression that most of the beer cans, the sake jars and vodka bottles, are not recent. This isn't the kind of place kids would hang out in to mess around, too far from the city. No, these are remnants of the old inhabitants. It's no surprise. He could see it in the way Hawks was around alcohol, vacillating wildly between drinking with total abandon and staring at beer as if it would bite him. The child of at least one alcoholic can't hide it as easily as they think. The first room is clearly the main living room, the tatami rotted through in areas. There's still an old TV in the back of the room, a kotatsu in front of it as if it were the centerpiece of the house. The run-down kitchen in the corner looks like it'd never been used. It's clear at this point that if Hawks is here, he's not awake or he would have heard him by now. Most likely. Better to brace himself for the worst.
He stops thinking as he crosses the room carefully, sticking to the edges where he knows the floor will be more solid. He tries to push the sliding door aside, but it's stuck, swollen by humidity and mold in its tracks. All he can do is turn to his side and squeeze through into the narrow hallway. What must be the toilet is on one end, the bath on the other. Across from him is the second room. It's smaller, a rotten futon folded up in the corner and another one thrown in the center of the room, recently torn apart judging by the whiteness of the insides. It's only then that he sees the jagged cuts in the sliding door, along all the walls. And scattered in the corners are a few red feathers. The closet in the corner is unexpected, a more western style as opposed to a proper oshiire. So he is here, or at least was; Endeavor feels a wave of vertigo.
He crosses the room in two steps and pulls the door towards him.
Hawks is curled up on a pile of feathers in the closet, half in the fetal position, his body wrapped around a small plush toy of Endeavor himself. Careworn and discolored, it's clearly from his childhood. Endeavor remembers that one, released nearly twenty years ago and almost immediately on clearance nationwide; he'd been relieved at the time, unwilling to have a plushie made of him at all. Now though, now he's grateful, because it brought Hawks to him against all odds.
He sees the orange and blue scribbles on the wall, the drawing of a little red-winged boy, the heart painstakingly scratched into the plaster. And it hits him, the full magnitude of what Hawks had done. He'd sacrificed his entire life, all that mattered to him, to save Endeavor and Shoto from the pain of having to kill a loved one. And Todoroki Enji knows then what he perhaps always knew but was unable to express, that Hawks is the love of his life.
He's still breathing.
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Hawks
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"Took a long time for me to track you down."
Hawks only blinks; he can't wrap his mind around what he's seeing. He doesn't feel weak enough to be hallucinating yet, shouldn't after only two or three days, but it is Endeavor-san after all. Who else would his broken brain manifest at the end of things?
"I knew your old Commission apartment was destroyed, but I reached out to some of the survivors. They still had all the digitized files. Of the agents. You."
He nods. He doesn't really know what he's saying. His brain is foggy with despair and confusion. He’d already resigned himself; he’d already begun to die in his mind.
"Checked your Mom's place first. After that... this was my last bet."
He can't remember ever giving the Commission his old address. He never even knew the address, so how could he have? But Endeavor somehow knows what is confusing him.
"The deeds," he says gently. "You bought a piece of land out here when you turned 18, but there were no records of anything being built. I figured... It was worth a look. This was the only building all the way out here."
"Why'd you come in?" His voice is low, raspy and unused. He hasn't gone this long without speaking since he was a child, since he had to be silent to avoid being beaten. Because there's no reason why Endeavor would have entered a collapsing building. He should have assumed at a glance that noone was here.
"I wanted..." he shrugs, like he was going to say something else but doesn't know how to say it. "I wanted to see where you lived."
He wants to vomit. He would if he could, but he can't remember the last time he ate and so he only feels a raw burning in his throat. "I never wanted you to see this."
"Why not?"
He says it so simply, like Hawks is being an idiot for not wanting him here, not wanting him to know. Someone like him, who always had everything, who has never known hunger or homelessness, can never understand the stark shame that comes with poverty. The Commission had taught him to speak properly, to drop his rural accent and slang, so that his hero brand would be marketable, because who wants a hero who acts like he never had a day of schooling? They taught him manners, bought him luxurious clothing even though he immediately changed into something more comfortable whenever he got home. Comfortable meant old, worn out, soft, and cheap. He never knew what to do with his money because for five years, he never saw his parents buy anything but alcohol and the rare shirt or toy for him. His father had come home once with a flat-tired tricycle he’d clearly stolen, in an unusually good mood because he’d just gotten a job, a hit. Two days later he was back to beating Hawks. Money confused him, and so even at twenty-three, he siphoned off most of his income to the mother who never loved him. All of that is so obvious, looking at this house. This sort of knowledge is private.
"It's an old house, Hawks. It's nothing to be ashamed of."
"I was born here." He watches Endeavor closely, watches for any hesitation, any disgust, any uncertainty.
But there's nothing, only confusion.
"Here. In this house," he whispers. "And I don't know if I ever left."
Because he doesn't know. There is no reason why he would come back here unless he never left. There are no good memories here, no love lingering in the floorboards, no joy in these layers of dust. Yet he lived here for five long years, nearly every day spent within these confines. He was allowed outside to play in the yard now and then, but he'd only been to town twice. He's never had any home, so it must be these four walls.
"Hawks."
"I slept in this closet, yea? My parents didn't let me outside much. I'd get beaten if I tried to go outside most of the time. But I still came back here. Doesn't make sense, does it?" He's rambling, his mouth dry and raw, but he doesn't know how to stop.
Endeavor only nods. "I wondered. You learned about my past, but you never spoke of your own," then he suddenly changes the subject. "I wanted to come sooner, but I...had things to take care of. I'm sorry."
The hitch in his breath gives him away. Things. He had to lay his son to rest after Hawks murdered him. He had to finally bury Toya for good a decade after the first funeral, which Hawks knows he refused to attend, instead spending the day wandering through the ruined wasteland of Mount Sekoto screaming his son's name until he coughed blood.
"I killed him."
"No, Hawks," he takes a deep breath. "He killed himself. If…if he’d gone through with what he wanted to do to Shoto, he’d have to end his own life. We all understand that. Nobody in my family blames you."
Because Dabi would burn himself up in killing Shoto, but it’s clear Endeavor believes something different, believes that Toya loved his little brother and would regret it, would end his own life in despair. Hawks isn’t so sure, but Endeavor loves his kids too much to ever believe they might not be good people. It’s something he loves about him. Yet. He doesn't know why he's bringing up his family now, doesn't know why Endeavor would talk about him with his estranged wife and kids. "You talked about me?"
One of his telltale snorts that come across as derision, but Hawks now knows they are only of awkwardness, of Endeavor's inability to communicate. "Obviously. We've been worried about you."
Impossible. He murdered Toya. And that aside, he can't imagine any of the Todoroki kids, much less Endeavor's wife, liked having him around. Even if there was nothing between them, there was talk. It couldn’t have been easy for the family.
"They know you helped me change. I'd wanted to for a while, but I couldn't without you pushing me forward. And I couldn't face my own son; you did it for me."
Hawks can only turn away from him, though the older man isn’t allowing for it.
"Come on, come here," he reaches for him, crouching, then kneeling down in the clutter, the dirt and the trash and the cockroach husks and mouse bones. "I could ask why you're here, too, but I don't think I have to."
"I came here to die." It's easy to say because it's easy to do. He has nothing more in his life; he's having difficulty even believing that Endeavor is here.
"I know. But you won't. There won't be two shrines in my house."
He frowns, but he doesn't fight him. He's too exhausted, too weak to do much of anything, and how can he after another mention of the man he'd only ever known as Dabi? He knows what it is to be an unloved child,and he’s grateful that Toya wasn’t that. He lets Endeavor fold him into his arms, leaning against him and sighing softly as he curls himself into a still-smaller ball.
He must reek, smelling of the house and all the alcohol he'd consumed recently, the stench of a body unwashed and starved for nearly a week, but Endeavor obviously doesn't care. He's solid against him, warm and massive. How many times had Hawks dreamed of this? How many nights had he laid awake in that very closet hoping that one day Endeavor would come for him? It was a hope that never went away, one he kept right up until he pulled the feather from Dabi's body.
"Come home."
"I..." I am home.
"You don't belong here. You're more than this."
"I killed people," he whispers. "And I didn't feel bad. I only felt bad because it hurt you, not because they were dead." Go away, go away. I don't deserve this. I came here to die. I came home.
Endeavor doesn't even react to that, doesn't flinch away or shove him back. "You did what you had to do. You're not your father, and this isn't where you belong. Come back with me. Please."
He feels them then, the pinpricks of love edging into his vision. He hasn't cried since he was a small child, but it's happening now, so foreign that he can barely recognize what's happening.
"You can hug me, you know. Instead of the doll."
Hawks finds himself blushing. He's had his arm around Endeavor plenty of times in both support and friendship, but never a hug, and certainly never after the man saying please. "I like the doll."
"Love you, too," Endeavor sighs, and there's a hand sliding up his back to ruffle his filthy hair. "So get yourself together and come on."
He suddenly understands then, the magnitude of what Endeavor is offering, what he is saying. He's not asking Hawks to explain himself, not asking him about his past, but he's accepting whatever it was, accepting whatever Hawks isn't ready to talk about, might not ever be ready to talk about. He's only saying he's there not only for the Hawks of now, but for the bruised and battered Hawks of 18 years ago who slept in a closet and whispered to a plush toy, and somehow that is more overwhelming than even the casual confession of love. This is why nothing felt right, why so much of his life was spent flying around the country, looking for a place he belonged, why he felt he had nowhere to go for his final resting place, a time he now knows can be far, far in the future.
He stops holding the tears in and lets himself cry for the first time in 20 years. “Take me home.”
And Endeavor does.